At present, in a PTN requiring high-precision time synchronization, a Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is generally employed to perform the 1588 time synchronization of nodes. In the PTN, a node employing PTP to perform time synchronization is called a PTP node. PTP nodes generally may include a Grandmaster Clock (GM) node, a Boundary Clock (BC) node and a Transparent Clock (TC) node. The method for PTP time synchronization may include that after a GM node establishes a synchronization link with BC nodes, the GM node transmits synchronization time to a BC node and then the BC nodes accomplish time synchronization one by one.
With the rapid development of mobile communication network technologies, the PTN network is getting larger and more complicated. Once a certain BC node has a time error, for example, time error caused by a frequency layer fault or a fault generated by a device during time transfer, other BC nodes behind this BC node with fault in the synchronization link will have a bigger synchronization time error, which finally affects the normal operation of services in the system. Generally, the fault detection on a synchronization link is conducted by a network administrator node by node. However, since there is a huge number of PTP nodes involved in synchronization in a PTN, it is very time-consuming to locate the fault manually. Moreover, manual detection not only raises the network management and maintenance cost but also impacts the reliability of the network.
Since fault detection is manually conducted on a node in a system in the existing technologies, a fault link cannot be identified rapidly, and thus the network management and maintenance cost cannot be reduced and the reliability of network cannot be guaranteed.